But for Ocado, the future of robotics looks an awful lot like a vacuum cleaner. The online food retailer is currently experimenting with a sucky robotic arm that specialises at picking groceries up and dropping them into shopping bags. At the moment the task of moving items from storage crates into customer order bags is exclusively performed by human employees, but the repetitive nature of the job makes it an ideal candidate for automation.

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“We wanted to see how far we can get with this level of simplicity,” says Graham Deacon, who headed the project. The robotic sucker can lift items weighing up to 300 grams and uses a camera to decide where to suck. Since the system relies on suction to grip, it searches for surfaces that are flat, smooth and horizontal. Although it can only deal with a fairly limited range of items at the moment, Deacon expects it will eventually be able to pick several thousand different items. The current version of the sucking robot will be on the factory floor by the end of next year.

“It looks for a certain set of criteria that need to be satisfied for the suction cup to work,” Deacon says. Once it has found a suitable gripping area, the robot arm dips down and sucks up the object, scans it and then drops it into a customer’s shopping bag, after automatically searching for a spot in the bag where nothing is in danger of getting crushed. It’s just as fast as a human picker, but unlike flesh-and-blood employees, the robot can work day and night without taking a break.

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Ocado’s warehouses are already highly automated, and this task is one of the few factory-floor jobs that are still performed by humans. Despite this, Deacon is confident that the net impact of automation at Ocado will be positive. “Robots are just another form of automation, and historically robots have created wealth and jobs,” he says, although he didn’t expand on how unskilled employees might share in the wealth generated by automation.

Whether the rise of increasingly clever robots creates jobs or not is still a subject of debate among academics and economists. Earlier this year researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University found that each robot introduced into the workplace takes away between three and six human jobs. A German study from September this year estimated that 275,000 fewer jobs were created in the decade between 1994 and 2014 as a result of automation. Low-skilled workers ended up with lower wages, the researchers found, but more highly skilled employees and those outside the manufacturing industry experienced no negative impacts as a result of automation.

But Ocado will have to hang on to some of its human pickers for the time being. The company’s robotic sucker can easily handle light, packaged items but it’s not able to pick up more fiddly or fragile produce like a bunch of bananas. The retailer has experimented with soft robotic hands that can pick fruit without bruising or damaging them, but those robots are nowhere near ready for use in its warehouses. Until those soft articulated robots learn to get to grips with fruit and veg, Ocado’s robotic vacuums are about as sophisticated as automated robo-pickers come.